Page 110 of Bitter Burn
For eight years, he’s built an entire kingdom to destroy the crown of one man, and for eight years, he’s done it knowing exactly who robbed him of the one thing he’d held close to his heart. Who pulled the trigger and how many times.
I think Mark loves me. But staring into his vast, turbulent, heartless eyes, I suddenly come to understand that he hated me long before that. That he might still.
Mark blinks and he’s back to his cool composure, expression betraying nothing, and I am shaking; I can’t make myself stand upright. I slump back against the desk.
“You hate opera music,” I say in a broken mumble, scrubbing a hand down my face. It’s only barely on the fringes of my memory, the soloist’s tragic voice floating into the night air. Just one more way that McKenzie’s death was too fucking absurd to exist inside the ordered and valor-laden coherence of the reality handed to me by my father and West Point.
“I hate opera music,” Mark agrees.
Isolde can’t hide her own shock—a rare thing for her—but there it is, in the splotches on her cheeks and her flicking gaze, as she stares at both of us.
“You said you hired me because you knew I’d do the right thing,” I say. I say it like I’m pleading with him.
“And once, eight years ago,” he says softly, “you did the wrong thing.”
The third box in Mark’s safe makes sense now, the articles and clippings and pictures going all the way back to the Distinguished Service Cross. So this was why he’d been following my career like a silent panther after its prey, watching as I became exactly what the Army wanted me to be—a hero—and as being a hero shattered whatever was left of my will and my mind and my resolve.
You are the only candidate, he said when he interviewed me for the job.
And now I know why.
“How?” I ask Mark in a whisper. “How have you been able to keep that hidden all this time? How have you been able to look at me—kiss me—and at Morois—” Oh God, Morois. When he’d shut himself away with his grief, and I’d shamelessly wriggled my way in, offering him the relief of my body when I’d been the one to create the need for relief in the first place. When I’d begged him to let me help him mourn, and all along, I was the reason for mourning. He’d fucked me into the carpet knowing I’d killed his husband. He’d let Eliot’s killer dress him and wash him and kiss his feet.
“It wasn’t precisely planned,” replies Mark, who’s now looking at the lake. A muscle jumps in his jaw. “I wasn’t supposed to care about you. I wasn’t supposed to want you. I’ve been around handsome men before, Tristan—I can generally hold my own. And then you ruined it. You ruined everything by being so good and sweet, my own little Maxen Colchester but better, because you let me right into that tender heart with no fight at all. Years spent stalking the man who killed my husband, only to find that I loved him like I’d never loved anyone before. You see what a fucking mess that made, right?”
“I’m sure he’s beginning to see it now,” says Mortimer, interjecting with the silky, inveigling curl of incense smoke. “He’s a smart boy. He’s putting together that there would only be one reason to hunt him down, one reason to trap him in your cage once he escaped the Army’s, and it wasn’t for the pleasure of providing him with health insurance. You didn’t stalk him for eight years only to offer him a job—you stalked him to kill. You stalked him to stop that tender heart from beating at all.”
Thirty-Seven
Isolde
Tristan’s cheeks and lips lose all color, going ashen as he stares at Mark with a hopeless, wounded confusion. My uncle smiles to himself, pleased to see his arrow find its target, and it’s that pleased smile more than anything that begets a deep and toneless horror in my marrow. He’s smiling because he’s right.
He’s smiling because it’s true.
For a moment, we are simply a tableau of lies, the handsome knight, the wicked king, the holy man wielding the divine authority to drag what was done in the dark into the light. My heart is barely working right now, a cinch of tight muscle, and my fingers and toes flicker and spark as my circulation struggles to keep up.
Tristan looks like he’s going to faint.
The moment ends, the tableau breaks. Mark sighs and pushes himself off the window, stepping toward my uncle with a disappointed expression.
“Is that your ace in the hole?” asks Mark mockingly. “You are predictable in every way I can imagine, Cashel, because the world is an orrery to you, a fixed, mechanical universe where nothing ever changes that can’t be predicted, nothing ever moves that can’t be measured. Change is beyond your mind’s reach, and even your curiosity is dulled with the certainty that everyone, always and everywhere, is secretly hoping to be the worst version of themselves.”
My husband lifts his eyes to Tristan. Dark, turbulent eyes, with the plundering strength of his body on full display against the glass.
“I wanted to kill you,” he admits. “In the beginning. Isolde too. You, the person who pulled the trigger. Her, the only soft spot I could find in the man who’d made sure a trigger would be pulled.”
My heart constricts to the point of pain, once again becoming a knot of bloodless muscle, and I squeeze my eyes shut. All this time—all the danger I felt rolling off him, all the trust I gave him anyway—I’d let this man tear me open and eat me whole, and he’d hated me through it all. He’d wanted to kill me all along.
I asked for you. I wanted you. He said that to me the night he gave me my engagement ring. And I’ve known since Samhain that he asked for me because of who my uncle was. But I hadn’t followed the logic any further, any deeper.
That I was to be revenge in its purest, oldest form.
I’m going to be sick. I’m going to be sick.
“But,” Mark goes on, starting to circle my uncle’s chair now, “life is not an orrery where we must spin forever in circles after being flicked by a careless finger. Life isn’t fixed. I fell in love with Isolde without meaning to. I became more obsessed with Tristan than I care to admit before I even met him. More importantly, I learned what the three of us had in common. Can you guess what that might be?”
He’s come around to the front of the chair, nudging my uncle’s black velvet loafer with his boot.
